Americans can no longer count on the U.S. government and the legacy media to protect them against egregious corporate wrongdoing and negligence. Regulators occasionally mete out fines that seem substantial, but it’s all for show and U.S. companies accept the penalties and accompanying critical rhetoric as simply the cost of doing business. The legacy media mostly functions as CEO groupies, shamelessly drooling over top executives who in America increasingly aren’t all that impressive.
Litigators are the last remaining bastion holding increasingly powerful corporations accountable. Litigators like James Butler, who last August won a landmark $1.7 billion jury judgement against Ford Motor Co. for allegedly selling pickup trucks the company knew couldn’t withstand rollover crashes. Cases involving defective vehicles are very personal for Butler; the Georgia attorney was seriously injured driving GM’s infamous Corvair, a car highlighted in Ralph Nader’s automotive industry expose called, “Unsafe at Any Speed.” Ford is appealing the verdict.
Litigators this week secured a landmark $290 million settlement from JPMorgan Chase, just days after they deposed bank CEO Jamie Dimon, a darling of Wall Street and the legacy media. It’s alarming if the reported settlement is news to you because it relates to what most Americans would regard as a heinous activity: Underage sex trafficking involving Jeffrey Epstein, among the world’s most notorious sexual exploiters of young girls.
Yes, America’s biggest and most powerful bank has reached an agreement in principle to pay $290 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the bank of having abetted Epstein’s activities, of course without any admission of wrongdoing. An unidentified Chase spokeswoman gave her personal assurances that the bank would never knowingly facilitate the activities of a felon who was convicted of procuring for prostitution an underage girl.
“We would never have continued to do business with (Epstein) if we believed he was using our bank in any way to help commit heinous crimes,” the Chase spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal.
It’s no mean feat getting Chase to cough up $290 million to settle damning allegations that merit Dimon’s dismissal, and this impressive Bloomberg story by Hannah Levitt gives some meaningful clues why and how the settlement quickly came together.
According to Levitt, Dimon was deposed on May 26 about his interactions with Mary Erdoes, JP Morgan’s “billionaire whisperer” who served as Epstein’s point person at Chase. Lawyers representing one of Epstein’s underage victims grilled Dimon to determine the executive who was ultimately responsible for Chase’s lucrative relationship with Epstein. Levitt reported that Erdoes’ name is mentioned at least 59 times in the transcript of Dimon’s deposition.
Levitt reported that lawyers for the unidentified Epstein victim asked the judge overseeing the case to recall Dimon and Erdoes for fresh depositions, citing a critical document produced in discovery after the CEO’s testimony.
“Needless to say, the late-produced document is one of the most relevant and responsive documents produced to date, and JPMC strategically withheld it from Plaintiff until she could no longer make meaningful use of it in examining JPMC’s employees,” a lawyer for an Epstein victim wrote to the judge.
In this June 9 Bloomberg article penned by Levitt and Ava Benny-Morrison, an unnamed and defiant Chase spokesperson is quoted as saying, “no amount of time on the record will change the fact that Jamie never met the man, never worked with the man, and wishes in hindsight the man had never been a client of the firm.” Three days later the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Chase has agreed to settle with the Epstein victims for $290 million.
It seems reasonable to speculate that Chase’s lawyers also believed the document uncovered in discovery was indeed “relevant and responsive” and that they didn’t want to risk Dimon being subjected to a follow up deposition.
Two of the lawyers spearheading the litigation to hold Chase and Dimon accountable are David Boies, chairman and a managing partner of Boies Schiller & Flexner, and Sigrid McCawley, another managing partner at the firm. Boies and McCawley are corporate lawyers, and it’s not entirely clear how they came to represent child sexual abuse victims.
Boies was long one of America’s most revered lawyers, a respect he established when he served as Special Trial Counsel for the United States Department of Justice in its victorious 2000 antitrust suit against Microsoft. Boies also served as the lead counsel for former vice president Al Gore litigating the 2000 presidential election vote in Florida. As co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in Perry v. Brown, Boies won the first judgment establishing the right to marry for gay and lesbian citizens under the U.S. Constitution.
Boies in recent years represented some very controversial companies and executives, including former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and Theranos and its fraudster founder, Elizabeth Holmes. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have good reason not to be among Boies’ cheerleaders.
The Times fired Mr. Boies’ firm, which had been representing the newspaper, after learning that he had been personally involved in an undercover operation to smear Mr. Weinstein’s victims and deceive Times reporters. The Times reported in 2018 that the Manhattan district attorney was looking into the matter, including Mr. Boies’ participation.
Boies, who also served on Theranos’ board, and his firm were also alleged to have bullied Theranos’ whistleblowers and threatened the Wall Street Journal with lawsuits if it chose to believe them. John Carreyrou, the WSJ reporter who exposed Theranos’ fraudulent activities, characterized Boies and his law firm colleagues as “thugs,” a label the Times said Boies took great exception to.
McCawley is one of the most fascinating attorneys I previously never heard of.
From McCawley’s Boies Schiller bio:
Sigrid is a Managing Partner of Boies Schiller Flexner, where she helps oversee the work of attorneys throughout the firm. Sigrid’s litigation talents have been nationally recognized. She was named Litigator of the Year by The American Lawyer, Top Ten Female Litigator in 2020 and 2021 by Benchmark Litigation, Finalist for Attorney of the Year in Florida by Daily Business Review, Most Effective Lawyer in Arbitration by Daily Business Review, a Leading Lawyer in America by Lawdragon, and a Thought Leader 2021 by Corporate Counsel.
McCawley’s bio also says she has served for the past 10 years on the board of directors for ChildNet, which manages the protection of over 3,000 neglected and abused children in South Florida, and also serves on the board of Jack & Jill, an organization focused on promoting child growth and development.
According to this December 2020 profile in Lawdragon, a fascinating legal website I only just discovered, McCawley’s innovative legal pursuits of Epstein and his alleged accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, were instrumental in their arrests. When Maxwell publicly dismissed one of Epstein’s victims as a liar, McCawley filed a defamation case, which allowed the litigator to expose details of the sexual abuse allegations despite the fact they were no longer prosecutable under the statute of limitations.
McCawley didn’t mince words about the government’s failure to aggressively prosecute Epstein’s activities.
“We see the emails that are going back and forth between the prosecutors who are supposed to be protecting the victims, and Epstein’s lawyers,” McCawley told Lawdragon. “That’s when you see the government corruption. They should have been protecting the victims, but instead, prosecutors basically started working on behalf of the defense, with emails saying things like ‘How do we keep the victims from not knowing this information?’
“It’s beyond terrible. This is corruption at a high level of government.”
Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in August 2019, and McCawley shared her insight.
“From my perspective, after having interacted with Epstein at varying times in person, in my view, he believed he was untouchable,” McCawley said. “There’s different sides of the camp, some believe he was assisted in that suicide. Some believe that he was given the liberty to be able to do it and bought that liberty by paying people off. I don’t know that we’ll ever have the answer to that.”
Lawdragon reported that McCawley is representing multiple Epstein victims pro bono, and her bio makes the same claim. I wouldn’t begrudge Boies or McCawley a significant portion of the Chase settlement, as they clearly deserve it.
Chase’s fallout from its Epstein involvement is far from over. New York reported that on Monday just hours after the bank settled with the Epstein victims, U.S. Virgin Islands prosecutors made public some of JPMorgan’s internal communications about Epstein and vowed they will continue to pursue Dimon’s bank.
“Discovery confirms that JPMorgan knowingly, recklessly, and unlawfully provided and pulled the levers through which Epstein’s recruiters and victims were paid and was indispensable to the operation and concealment of Epstein’s trafficking,” the prosecutors wrote in their latest filing. “JPMorgan had real-time information on Epstein’s payments that the government did not and had specific legal duties to report this information to law-enforcement authorities, which it intentionally decided not to do.”
FOX News reported that Chase doesn’t plan to settle the U.S. Virgin Islands lawsuit. The territory was home to Epstein’s compound infamously known as “pedophile island” where Epstein owned a mansion and two-private islands.
It’s a measure of JPMorgan’s shamelessness that in response to Bloomberg’s inquiry about JPMorgan executive Mary Erdoes’ prominent role interacting with Epstein, spokesman Darin Oduyoye issued this statement:
“Mary has always held herself and her colleagues to the highest standards of integrity and trust. Her competence and character are top-notch.”
Highest standards of integrity? Maybe by Jamie Dimon’s standards.